Belgium 2016

Pitpass.com

As the Formula One season reconvened at Spa so too has the Pitpass team been busy discussing a Belgian Grand Prix that created more than one talking point. It's a podcast with a bit of a difference, as the trio of Chris Balfe, Mat Coch and Max Noble discuss and analyse the impact of the race on the sport as a whole. There's much noshing and wailing of teeth over Max Verstappen, and the tactics the young Dutch (or Belgian, delete where appropriate) employs. More than that though Balfe traces the Red Bull driver's approach back to its genesis moment in the sport, and it's not quite where you might expect. Of course Kevin Magnussen couldn't escape without a mention, and though the team stop short of awarding points for artistic merit do suggest that such incidents are a warning shot across the bows of the sport. Furthermore they ponder whether that such a crash has happened, and Magnussen escaped relatively uninjured, is perhaps one of the reasons drivers like Verstappen can employ the tactics they do. Yes, it's a real chicken and the egg episode which inevitably leads the team to talk about whether the sport is a sport or if the sport isn't a sport and the sport has become not a sport because sport doesn't sell as well as sport used to. Sport. Then again maybe it's just all business and we should be happy we've got a show to watch, and that it's not been cancelled by fat cat television execs as audience numbers fall. Somewhere in amongst it all there are discussions on Nico Rosberg as Coch and Noble try to work out exactly which one - Nico or his evil twin - turned up in Spa all the while trying to calculate exactly where Lewis Hamilton should have started from. Somewhere near Brussels, was Balfe's guess. Unlike the team radio though it's not all moaning and negativity, though there is groaning about the moaning back to base. It's all a bit like the school yard out there with everyone running to tell teacher - in Verstappen's case, while holding scissors. Still, Max Noble has the solution to all of F1's problems with a neat little rule change that could be enacted next week. It's a simple, elegant and fuss free way of managing penalties. So it'll never happen.